"Scaffolding" refers to the temporary support that parents and others give a child to perform a task. In narrative contexts, children's speech is guided and scaffolded by mothers who initiate and elicit children's contributions about past experiences. Unfortunately, data on this phenomenon from languages other than English are very limited. To fill this gap, this study explored how maternal patterns of narrative elicitation relate to young Japanese children's developing narrative discourse skill. Personal narratives of 20 middle-class Japanese preschoolers, ages 4 and 5, and their mothers were analyzed using the Labovian approach (Labov, 1972). Also, using a speech act coding system (McCabe and Peterson, 1991), conversations between the same 20 mother-child pairs were analyzed to study differences in narrative elicitation between mothers of 4- and 5-year-olds. Results in terms of developmental patterns indicated that: (1) compared to adults, young children emphasized a temporal sequence of action with less emphasis on nonsequential information, especially orientation; and (2) although 4-year-olds gave proportionately less evaluation than adults, no differences were observed between 5-year-olds and adults. In terms of social interaction aspects, mothers of children of different ages were found to use different techniques to elicit children's participation in narrative discourse; mothers of 4-year-old children requested more evaluation from their children than did mothers of older children. Results suggest that how mothers verbally interact with their young children during narrative elicitation is reflective of those children's developing narrative skills. (Contains 28 references.) (Author/EV)